EQ – Emotional Quotient.

In the most general sense, it is a sensitivity to one’s mood and the moods of others. A person with a high emotional intelligence might recognise when a fiery outburst might actually contain a plee for help. They might have a healthy scepticism or pessimism of common strong emotions such as: love, desire, anger, empathy, envy, or anxiety.

Honing one’s EQ can allow you to question the trust of first impulses avoiding costly inaccuracies. Or, how to interpret ourselves and how our childhoods influence us and our peers alike. Unlike some of the concepts of IQ, EQ is not frequently taught or practised and doing so can help us navigate our fears and wishes.

IQ is a comparison to your peers via a set of standardised tests. These try and test how you process information, recognise patterns and access working memory. Generally thought to be influenced by genetics, it can waver to a degree over one’s life due to:

EQ is harder to test for and whilst you can take a number of IQ tests online, your emotional quotient is generally assessed in the presence of a professional or sometimes a trusted peer with the help of the ESCI (Emotional and Social Competence Inventory). These tests seek to find your ability to understand and control emotions. It is thought to be more fluid than IQ and able to be trained. Whilst it is typically correlated with IQ, the two can work independently and various problems arise when an EQ falls below an IQ such as:

When EQ is not considered it can lead to unhealthy coping mechanisms when life presents challenges.

Whilst IQ is falling out of favour as a predictor of general success and happiness, EQ – having only just been coined in 1990 – is beginning to show some true benefits. Perceiving how others feel and controlling one’s own emotions can facilitate communication, whether that be in a workplace environment or at home. One’s ability to relate to others can be a marker of their leadership potential, or their ability to function as a team member. In a “changeable, complex, uncertain, and ambiguous” world, one can regulate knee jerk response and formulate clearly deliberated decisions. Nobel-prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman even found data to suggest that our buying power is increased as those with a lower EQ where more likely to “pay more for an inferior product.”